After the incident in which Florence sees death by her bedside, she is haunted by thoughts of people from her past and how she has betrayed and hurt them. To the reader, this remorse is unwarranted. Florence is, or at least at one time had been, a strong-willed, independent woman and one of the most blameless characters in the novel.
Her desertion of her mother came only after her employer's sexual advances, when she realized that her time in that place had come to its inevitable end. Her moving north and leaving her family had nothing to do with having a cold heart. She simply wanted something better for herself than she believed she could find where she was. She didn't want to exchange her mother's cabin for one of her own and work herself to death as her mother had. Besides, Gabriel was still at home, and it seems only fair that he would have to return to his mother some of the care that she had lavished upon him for so many years.
Florence's guilt concerning Gabriel also seems out of place. That she "held him to scorn and mocked his ministry" is, to some degree, justified. No one knows Gabriel better than Florence does. She has seen Gabriel at his very worst and is not impressed by his best. She sees him as a liar, a hypocrite, and even as a murderer for letting the mother of his baby run off to die alone in childbirth. In short, according to Florence, Gabriel is not fit for the ministry.
